Amari AI raises $4.5 million to automate customs brokerage

Amari AI came out of stealth mode on Thursday, announcing $4.5 million in funding co-led by First Round Capital and Pear VC. The startup, co-founded by Arushi Vashist and Sam Basu—who quit his job at Google in early 2023—aims to modernize the customs brokerage industry. Customs brokers are professionals who help companies move goods across borders. Operating quietly until its launch, the company has already secured more than 30 customers and helped those firms move more than $15 billion of goods.

The customs brokerage industry remains heavily reliant on paper. According to co-founder Sam Basu, many customs brokers—particularly in the Los Angeles area—are still dependent on fax machines and paper. This reliance creates significant operational friction at a time when the industry faces a severe talent shortage. By law, customs brokerage employees must be located in the United States, preventing companies from outsourcing labor. Meanwhile, the licensing exam pass rate for customs brokers hovers around 10% to 20%. Basu noted that experienced professionals are increasingly leaving the industry or taking early retirement, leaving logistics companies in need of additional support alongside human expertise.

Amari AI aims to address these inefficiencies by deploying AI agents to automate data entry and monitor shifting trade rules. While some brokers have previously used optical character recognition—a technology used to convert images of text into machine-readable data—Basu noted that such software is limited and brittle. In contrast, Amari AI’s models are trained on more than one million documents from shipments the company has already helped clear. To address privacy concerns, the startup anonymizes customer data, and Basu emphasized that the company does not sell customer data and ensures that clients retain full ownership of their information.

Early adopters see the technology as a necessary shift to navigate shifting trade policies. Chris Bachinski, the CEO of GHY International, a 125-year-old logistics firm, explained that sudden changes in trade policy require brokers to act quickly to help clients understand how new rules apply to goods in transit. “It’s an old industry, and technology is going to shift our industry faster than I think most customs brokers understand,” said Chris Bachinski, the CEO of GHY International.

Why it matters

Amari AI is tackling a critical bottleneck in trade by applying AI to the paper-heavy customs brokerage industry, which is currently struggling with labor shortages and complex, shifting trade regulations.